Second hard drive on laptop

jmt356
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Second hard drive on laptop

Post by jmt356 »

I bought a laptop, went to upgrade the hard drive and found the hard drive bay empty. I assume this means that there is another hard drive hidden somewhere in the components. If I install a new hard drive, how will the laptop know which one to boot into?
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JMT

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HansV
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Re: Second hard drive on laptop

Post by HansV »

The UEFI/BIOS stores which drive will be used as the startup drive. I presume that it will keep on using the current one when you install a new drive.
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BobH
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Re: Second hard drive on laptop

Post by BobH »

Why do you need/want a second hard drive? Are you out of disk space, maybe? If so, and if you have a place for it, consider making the second drive a solid-state hard drive (SSHD). It is smaller even than a laptop hard drive. It has no moving parts to wear out meaning also that accessing data on the drive is faster. Investigate them and see if one would suit your needs. They have come substantially in price.
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Jay Freedman
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Re: Second hard drive on laptop

Post by Jay Freedman »

Many new laptops now come with an M.2 solid state drive, which looks like a small circuit board plugged into the motherboard. For examples, https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-m2 ... ate-drives.

jmt356
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Re: Second hard drive on laptop

Post by jmt356 »

Hans: Is it possible to keep the original disk as the bootable disk and then install the second disk as a data disk? If I am in the first disk, which holds to OS, will it recognize the second disk?

BobH: I don't want a second hard drive. I want to expand the size of the hard drive that came with the laptop. I was expecting to remove the old drive and replace it with the new one, but after opening up the laptop, I discovered that there was an empty hard drive bay. So I will be adding a second hard drive. I don't know how I would remove the original hard drive. It seems to be buried in the components.

Jay Freedman: I believe the original hard drive is an M.2 SSD.
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JMT

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HansV
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Re: Second hard drive on laptop

Post by HansV »

jmt356 wrote:
14 Nov 2020, 22:37
Hans: Is it possible to keep the original disk as the bootable disk and then install the second disk as a data disk? If I am in the first disk, which holds to OS, will it recognize the second disk?
That will be the default situation, as far as I know.
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Hans

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StuartR
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Re: Second hard drive on laptop

Post by StuartR »

jmt356 wrote:
14 Nov 2020, 22:37
I believe the original hard drive is an M.2 SSD.
An M.2 SSD is not a hard drive. It is a solid state drive. These are much smaller, faster, cooler, and quieter than hard drives, and they draw less power.

If you add a hard disk drive to this laptop then you will shorten the time it can run on battery power and cause the laptop to run noiser, and hotter. Depending on the size of the existing SSD, you might be able to replace it with a higher capacity drive, which would be much better, but would cost more.
StuartR


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BobH
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Re: Second hard drive on laptop

Post by BobH »

Leave the existing M.2 SSD in place. It has your OS and probably other data on it. Adding a second SSD will give you additional disk space (providing you have place to mount it and connect it) . . . as much as you wish to buy. You can then control what goes on which device. You will simply see another device in File Explorer. If you have nothing but a SSD, it is probably the C:/ drive. Adding another SSD will cause a D:/ drive to appear. If you have one SSD and it is partitioned into multiple logical drives, you may already see C:/, D:/ etc. Adding an additional SSD will increase the alphabetic designation appropriately.

If the space in the laptop is arranged for a true hard drive, you can probably get an adapter that will accept an SSD but plug in as it it were a hard drive. That all depends on you machine's internal configuration.

If I've misspoken, I trust to others here to correct me.
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